Honesty Enabled by Anonymity

Quote for the Day

When achievers fail, they see it as a momentary event, not a lifelong epidemic. ~ John C. Maxwell

I just stumbled upon this quote today, and it felt very apt to my current situation, as well as many core tenets about me.

I shudder to call myself the achiever even in analogy, but we’ll put that aside for the moment. He had a few other quotes that were from the same book that also struck me, given the situation with my business.

“In life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with your problems. If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve?

The essence of man is imperfection. Know that you’re going to make mistakes. The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does. Wake up and realize this: Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success.

Achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere. The average for entrepreneurs is 3.8 failures before they finally make it in business.” ~ John C. Maxwell.

I haven’t fact checked his numbers. Frankly, I don’t care enough to. I’ve lived in a cut throat market watching small business after small business choke out and give up in anywhere from days to decades. Whether it is 3.8 or not, I’ve seen how hard it is to make it work.

I’ve spent my whole life emotionally working with a kind of “Rocky” mentality: It’s not about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep on going. I’ve carried that message with me as a standard operating procedure most of my life. And yet…

I never imagined I would open a business or become an entrepreneur in the first place. Let alone how it would affect me when I ended it. And I obviously never imagined ending it for this reason. I’m finding myself grieving as if over the loss of a person, not just a business. Not surprising, I guess. A business is really just a dream, an idea. Dreams dying kills a bit of you each time.

But you really can’t kill an idea. It diverts, like water, working it’s way through obstacles.

My business, or should I say, my first business, might be over, yes. But at it’s heart, it’s an idea, and that isn’t dead at all: it’s just evolving.

This was my first attempt at running my own business. It will not be my last.